Password required

April 21, 2006

There is no honor . . .

Update: "If you could splice a couple of relevant cat photos into the text, it would enhance your message," writes our imail correspondent after working her way through this post. Her wish is our command. Above, Tiny stares out the window this morning, with intermittent "chattering," at an adorable bluejay couple who seem to be nesting in the area.

His hatred of all things Western apparently crystalized during six months at Colorado State Teachers College in the conservative ranching town of Greeley during 1949. An excerpt from his book, The America I Have Seen -- quoted by NPR's Robert Siegel in the excellent "Sayyid Qutb's America," produced in 2003 -- suggests Qutb's projection of his own unwelcome sexual feelings onto the All-American Greeley co-eds:

The American girl is well acquainted with her body's seductive capacity. She knows it lies in the face, and in expressive eyes, and thirsty lips. She knows seductiveness lies in the round breasts, the full buttocks, and in the shapely thighs, sleek legs -- and she shows all this and does not hide it.

Update II: Paw meets egg in the aftermath of Easter Sunday.

It wasn't just gynophobia, of course. "He felt a deep sense of anger and humiliation over the fact that Egyptians and other Muslims were unable to forge their own identity free of Western controls," says historian John Calvert in the NPR piece, noting that Qutb's discourse on the West "sort of mimics the Orientalist discourse on the Middle East." A mutual disadmiration society of willful misunderstanding and disinformation. More from Calvert in a Worldpress interview last year:

I think he was a little bit afraid of women. He projected a lot of stuff on to women. He regarded women as a potential source of fitna, or social discord . . . Qutb was very afraid of the effects of sexuality as something that would compromise his identity as a God-fearing Muslim.

If you look at his book Thorns, at the episodes he says that he experienced in the United States, women are always there in the background as temptresses. I don’t think that this pathology is common to Islamic culture, but I think Qutb certainly had a troubled relationship with women.

Not common to Islamic culture? That's debatable. [Check out our Bahrainian blogfriend Mahmood's witty take on "Those unmentionable beings: Women."] But the larger point about "Western culture seeping into Egypt," while understandable, resonates with irony in light of the influence of Western thinking on Qutb's own ideas, as referenced by Patrick Poole of Existential Space last year:

Update III: Tiny goes for the jugular of one of the colored eggs from the Easter centerpiece. Notice how shattered the shell is after several episodes of being batted off the table down onto the floor.

Alan Krueger and Daniel Kahneman hail the progress that has been made in measuring subjective well-being, or happiness. They say that researchers in this field, which is on the boundary between economics and psychology, have developed reliable methods to measure how well a person is feeling. This in turn enables them to make reliable assessments of how happiness is affected by income (both in absolute terms and relative to that of others), marital status, and how people allocate time among various activities, from socializing (good) to commuting alone (bad).